Bone Palace, The - Amanda Downum Page 0,9
shirt. His fingers trailed down to the sharp angle of her hip and lingered there.
Isyllt devoured three nut and honey pastries; after the second she couldn’t taste the dead woman’s blood any longer. Black peppered tea burned some of the death-chill from her flesh, eased the fatigue dragging at her eyes. Mekaran watched her eat and smiled when the plate was clean.
“Is there anything else you need tonight? I’ll listen around here.”
“Did you know Forsythia’s name?”
He frowned. “No,” he said slowly. “She was a refugee, I think. She didn’t like to talk about the past.”
An omission, if not a lie, but Isyllt didn’t feel like bullying him. She licked honey off her fingers. “If you hear anything at all”—she included Dahlia with a glance—“come to me, not the Vigils. Quietly.” She counted out coins, several times the price of tea and cakes; she’d need to start a new expense tally when she got home.
Mekaran nodded, unasked questions in his eyes. “You should come here more often—as a friend of Ciaran’s, at least. The Crown ought to keep its agents better fed.” He gathered Dahlia—and the money—and steered the girl back to the kitchens.
Ciaran’s hand slipped round Isyllt’s waist again. “You’re still cold. Come to my room and warm up.” His voice was smoke and wine, rich and dark. She shivered.
“Not tonight,” she said with a smile. “I’m working.” She took a last sip of tea, spices burning the roof of her mouth.
His brow creased in a frown. “You’re not going underground alone?” He’d known her for nearly sixteen years, and knew the sort of stupid things she was likely to do.
“Not now,” she promised. She bumped his hip until he moved aside. With a sigh she collected her coat, leather heavy in her arms. “First I pay a visit to the palace.”
The fastest way to the new palace was past the old. Nearly everyone was willing to sacrifice time to avoid it, but Isyllt tipped the coachman well enough to overcome his misgivings. She drew the curtains back in the cab as they passed. The night was already morbid; what was a little more gloom?
A wall had been built decades ago to contain the ruin—thick grey stone, tall and topped with warded iron—but the towers and domes were visible above it. White sandstone shone soft and ghostly in the cloud-tattered moonlight. By day the grime and decay of centuries were visible, but the night washed it clean as bones. The horses didn’t care about the view. Already they sped into a bone-jarring canter. Over the creak and rattle of wheels and springs Isyllt heard the driver curse.
By Isyllt’s standards it was a mild night. The breeze over the ruin only made her nape prickle and her ring itch. On bad days proximity to the palace would set a mage to retching, or leave their head throbbing for hours. And that was after decades of wind and sun and clean rain to ease the taint—she couldn’t imagine what it must have been like two centuries ago.
No one was entirely certain what had happened in the original palace. Everyone who had been in the throne room died—instantly, some legends told it, others slowly and terribly, but either theory was only conjecture. That they died was certainly true, and nearly everyone else in the palace as well, save those lucky few who escaped the maelstrom of furious magic and summoned spirits. Over the decades, the story had been built and layered and embossed to a tragedy worthy of a thousand stages.
The events leading up to the disaster were well-documented, or as well as two-hundred-year-old sources could be trusted. Tsetsilya Konstantin, cousin and purported lover of the crown prince, died from a fall down a flight of tower stairs. The prince, Ioanis Korinthes, fled the palace that night in a rage and returned several days later, no less wrathful and with a handful of sorcerers at his back. Who exactly might have pushed Tsetsilya—if pushed she was—and what words were spoken between Ioanis and his father, Demos II, could only be speculated. Ioanis’s involvement with a proscribed sect of spirit worshipers was also speculation.
However it came to pass, the barriers between the mortal world and the reflected world were ripped violently asunder, and a vortex of magic and hungry spirits emerged. Incursions into the palace days later found bodies charred, eviscerated, flayed, sucked to empty husks, and deliquescing in foul puddles. Intact corpses had already been possessed, as well as any survivors who hadn’t